"BORROWED TIME"

RELOC is a multi-millionaire company that offers to their clients the possibility of spending time with a beloved one deceased tragically in the past. The concept is called “Relocation”. The company simply tracks the events that led to the tragic death of a particular subject in the past; then, the subject is relocated from an instant before his or her death and teleported with a device into the future. However, the process only allows a person to remain in the future for 24 hours. The person that undergoes the process of Relocation is referred as “Reloc”. After the 24 hours, the company returns the subject, to die and preserve history.

But things get complicated. On top of the evident moral debate implied by the company’s methods, Martin McGregor, one of the recent relocated subjects brings with him an intriguing secret that will shake the grounds of this company and future society.

"CURL"

CURL is the next of my projects, still waiting to see the light, but this is one in which I have actually worked on recently and it will be probably the one I finish first because unlike my other "projects", this one is one I know how it's gonna end; from the writer's perspective this is the best way to complete a work fast. Not knowing how your story is going to end puts you a little in the place of the reader, which is good, but sometimes leads to too much improv, at least in my case. Otherwise, directing your story towards what you have in mind is easier when you actually have something in mind to lead it to.

The inspiration of CURL is manifold. In fact, the underlining idea actually inspired another story I wrote some years ago called DELAY. It was more specifically a "fanfic" (or "fan-fiction", a short story based on characters created by another artist); for decades I've been a huge fan of Chris Carter's "The X-Files", so fan that I actually started to write my own episodes and publish them in fans forums. DELAY tells the story of an electromagnetic anomaly that sucks up an airliner of which one of the main characters is a passenger of. On board, the crew starts experiencing weird phenomena with time. In the end( I'll give it away) the characters come to the conclusion that the airplane is trapped in a gravitational ripple with the shape of a Moebius band. DELAY in time is inspired by an Argentinean movie called "Moebius", about a train car (not an airplane) lost in a Moebius band. The Moebius band itself is an interesting mathematical object with eccentric properties known as the one-sided strip.

The second (and main) source of inspiration of CURL is "Star Trek - The Next Generation"; a particular episode caused an impression on me many years ago and, in essence, CURL is some sort of a 'remake', with my own spin of it. "Star Trek" was my favorite series in the '90s and as a 90-er, I was more fond of the Piccard version rather than the Shatner's. I remember they used to air it Sundays right before noon and I confess that their stories were very good. I, however, am not a die-hard fan (not as much as  of "The X-Files", which I know to the last detail). In any case, the episode in question portrayed the Enterprise rescuing a small vessel drifting off course nearby a supernova or a black hole. The crew discovers pretty soon that the vessel is a scape pod belonging to a ship of the Federation. Soon after they find out it belongs to the Enterprise itself. Moreover,  on board of the vessel there is no other but Cpt. Piccard himself! But how come? Enterprise's Cpt. Piccard is at the bridge, at the helm of the ship! Where this other one came from? As the episode progresses, we learn that the scape pod is the twin version of a scape pod in the hangars of the Enterprise and the recovered vessel and its passenger are future versions that have traveled back in time using the black hole. But the alternate Piccard is hurt and according to the twin vessel's computer log, something really bad happened to Enterprise, something so bad that the only survivor was Piccard who traveled back in time to warn the crew of the upcoming disaster.

The story itself is very "Star Trek"-ish as one can realize; but it involves one of my favorite sci-fi topics: time travel; as well, it involves my favorite time travel issue: paradoxes and timeloops. 

Indeed, Piccard and the crew of the Enterprise are trapped in a timeloop: the spaceship was going to inevitably be destroyed by the black whole, Piccard was going to survive escaping in the escape pod and return on time only to be rescued by an early version of the crew itself who would again fail to fall under the power of the black whole over and over and over ad infinitum. 


This poses an interesting landscape into time travel itself one of whose main problems is established by the so-called "Grandfather's paradox", in which a time-traveler goes back in time and kills his own grandfather creating in consequence a major paradox. Serious scientist have proposed a solution to the paradox and called it "The mother's paradox" and in certain way CURL is an attempt to dumb down such solution. The premise of the story is simple: how would you defeat someone in possession of a time machine? This is actually a question raised by Stephen Hawking himself in one of his books. The answer is...

You will have to read CURL to find that out. 

Some few years ago, I created a video trailer for this story that more or less is a representative of what I have in mind. Here's the link:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC-GmYPiFCs

I hope you like it. 

"TECHNOMANCY"

TECHNOMANCY is an old project of mine whose origins date back to about probably 6 years. I sincerely don't even remember what inspired it; maybe it was my first contact with the power of computation in cryptography or the marvels posed by "quantum computation".In actuality, I don't think a quantum computer can even do what I claim it to do in the story, but who cares? It's sci-fi. The reach of quantum computation, however, is so wide that I might as well be very wrong.

The other element involved in TECHNOMANCY is my favorite sci-fi topic, time travel. Travelling through time is a subject widely exploited both in old and modern literature as well as cinema. For me it is not about the fact of travelling to another era what fascinates me, but the rules that might govern such undertake. Many different artists (or even serious scientists) have imprinted many different takes on "the rules of time travel". Nowadays is widely known that the problem of time travel is no longer a problem of Physics but a problem of engineering (we simply lack of the technology to build a time machine). I have my particular point of view on the matter (I'll explain it one of these days) but indeed this is a topic that extends to several interesting territories such as fate and/or free will and/or the existence of a higher power, etc, which are always very interesting to explore from the sci-fi POV.  In this sense I feel also influenced by the work of Gregory Benford, particularly the novel "Timescape" which basically uses the same idea I want to introduce in mine. Benford also goes technical, but he takes a very different road.

The storyline of TECHNOMANCY revolves around a group of hackers that infiltrate an allegedly military channel and steal what in appearance is a portion of an encrypted message. However, the hackers rapidly discover that their names are in the message! As further intercepted mysterious messages unveil their content, the thieves start dieing under particular circumstances, as predicted in the messages. The main character is the last in the list and has 24 hours to discover the enigma behind the messages before dieing as predicted; his desperate inquiry will lead him to a dark mysterious telecommunications company which has perfected an incredible technology in whose hands the future of millions might be at stake!

TECHNOMANCY is sitting on a dusty drawer or a desk somewhere right now, waiting for me to write it. It is aimed to be a short novel and the main idea is to warn about the "dangers" of quantum technology in the wrong hands, a little bit like Michael Chricton's dinosaurs, with quantum technology in the place of bioengineering. It is my hope that with the pass of days (or weeks, or months or years) the story grows its way up to the light rather than shriveling and dieing.

I won't let it die. That I promise.